How to shoot self portraits
Hello people! Paul Tarabozzo here and this time I want to show you how I did this great moody self-portrait so you can do your version even if you don’t have any advanced camera and photoshop skills.
I was using my favorite beast Sony a9 and Sony 16-35 2.8 G Master lens, which is a great fit for such photos because of the wide-angle that allows to include lots of surroundings, but any other lens that is wider than 35 would do a great job.
I put my camera on a tripod a little lower than the waist level and tilt it up a little to get more of the sky and less of the ground. My tip here – put a horizon lower than the center of the frame, otherwise, you’ll split your photo into two halves and you won’t get this epic sky effect and your composition won’t be dynamic.
I was using the Sony native ImageEdge app to have a live feed from my camera straight on the phone to see what exactly I’m shooting. It helps for self-portraits since I don’t need to guess what’s in the frame.
When everything is ready to roll, the next step is to start a continuous shooting on the camera and start acting in front of it. When as I think I got what I was looking for it’s a good practice to check what footage I have and make sure I have what I was looking for.
The next step is post-production. Let’s dive in so I can show you how to finish this photo so it will look epic:)
The first step is to find some photos on the internet that I believe should work well in this collage. I needed birds in the sky and a whale tail. I took a photo of the birds and googled a photo of the whale’s tail, making sure I downloaded it in a good resolution.
When I have all necessary elements I start photoshop, open my main photo, and add all necessary extra shots as layers adjusting their size so they look proportionally, putting them in the right positions.
As you see if I just put one layer on another I don’t see what’s under and it doesn’t look well. To fix this I need to adjust a blending mode and put it on the color burn. I’ll do a separate video about these blending modes in my next videos.
If I want to delete certain parts of this layer I can use a spot healing tool, it will erase certain elements not leaving any dirt around.
I’ll do the same actions with the whale tail.
The last part of any post-production is always color grading. Colour helps to blend everything together and to emphasize the mood. I want this photo to be cold and dark so I decrease exposure and adjust the white balance making everything colder.
This is the final result – as you see it looks great, and it doesn’t require any advanced camera or photoshop skills, but it requires imagination and action, so guys my advice to you – stop overthinking about shooting and go shoot some stuff. If you have any questions – you can reach me by leaving comments under this video and don’t forget to subscribe – it gives me a magic kick in the ass to keep shooting more YouTube videos. See you next time:))))